Would a progressive alliance work? April 21st, 2017
Another day in an unwanted election campaign and another blog post. I’ve barely touched this blog in years and now I’m posting on consecutive days. I must have a fire in my belly, a fire for POLITICS (I haven’t).
Since the election was announced I’ve seen lots of people talking about how progressive politics (however you define that) could come together in an alliance and kick the Tories out. It seems a nice idea, after all the people who want nice things must outnumber the people that want to kill us all, shouldn’t they?
I thought I’d have a go at using the 2015 election data to see what would have happened if an alliance had existed. First off I know you can’t compare one election with another. Especially one which didn’t have the open wound of Brexit bleeding all over it.
The 2015 election was dominated by the received wisdom that it would be a hung parliament and that forces would conspire to take the referendum off the nut jobs of UKIP. The EU wasn’t really an issue for anyone and, temporarily, the UK looked like it would hold together.
So, based on the glaring fact that data from 2015 can tell us very little what does it tell us?
I took a spreadsheet with all constituency results from the 2015 election, excluding Northern Ireland, and made some calculations. You can see it here. Oh, you might ask why I didn’t include Northern Ireland, oddly the data wasn’t in the spreadsheet I got from the British Election Study. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it anyway as the difference in parties mess up my assumptions. Sorry Northern Ireland (please don’t leave us) but all this assumes a Parliament of 632 seats.
The obvious first hurdle is to try and figure out what a progressive alliance would look like. Who would ally together and what the hell would the basis of an alliance be? Other than not being Conservative. The Lib Dems record in coalition could only be considered progressive in the loosest sense. Labour’s pro-Brexit stance would alienate many potential coalition partners. Even the Green Party’s insistence that an EU referendum was a good idea don’t come out of this mess entirely blamelessly.
In the end, I used the most extreme definition of an alliance and grouped together Labour, Lib Dems, Green Party, SNP and Plaid Cymru. Even reading that back to myself I realise how ludicrous that is.
I calculated the combined vote (in 2015) of an alliance and whether that would have beat a Conservative vote. I then figured out which would have been the leading alliance party and therefore how many seats each party would have had.
The results would have been: –
Alliance = 348 seats (out of 632)
Conservatives = 284 seats (out of 632)
A thumping win for progressive politics and David Cameron weeping into a pork pie.
That would have broken down into:-
Labour = 261
Lib Dems = 26
Green = 1
SNP = 57
Plaid Cymru = 3
OK, a bump for Labour and not quite the decimation of the Lib Dems. Realistically that would have been another coalition Government but without the Tories. That might be encouraging if you’re a fan of coalitions.
Then it occurred to me that I’d left out something fairly crucial.
If a progressive alliance exists then what’s to stop the Conservatives and UKIP creating a regressive alliance? After all, we can’t have people stealing that Brexit.
As it goes I believe that UKIP are over as a party but their votes need to go somewhere. In order to follow it through I bunged together the Conservatives and UKIP and ran that against my progressive alliance.
It changed things, a lot. The results would have been:-
Progressive Alliance = 274
Conservatives (Regressive Alliance) = 358
A whopping win for the Conservatives.
That breaks down into seats as:-
Conservatives = 357
UKIP = 1
Labour = 199
Lib Dems = 14
Green = 1
SNP = 57
Plaid Cymru = 3
Almost all of that is at the expense of Labour. Which, I think, raises the issue of where those UKIP votes go in the future. If an alliance prompts those UKIP votes towards the Conservatives then there is no benefit in an alliance.
All of this is working around a historic low vote for the Lib Dems, in both examples they benefit from an alliance but I would assume in the 2017 election they will be getting close to these levels of seats just because they’re holding a unique pro-EU position in this election.
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